Part of falling behind has also been great fun. Alex (one of my ex's, and a very good friend) came to visit Saturday and is staying with us through tomorrow. We had a mini-reunion Saturday night -- Alex and Todd and Jordan and Michael and Kevin and me. Very reminiscent of the old days in the U of C math department, though of course it would have been even better with Bryan and Elissa and Tasos and Eugenie and Kirsten and Adam and Tom and Greg and Jerome -- some day we really have to get all of us back together in one place... We played bridge and poker and talked Tolkien trivia and generally had a tremendously good and hilarious time. It's been ten years and no one's changed at all.
And then yesterday, Alex and I drove out to Jordan's place and met Jordan's wife Carol and daughter Madeleine; I had a hot buttered rum and toasted marshmallows in their backyard by the firepit, which was very satisfying on a chilly evening. Then way too much dinner at a local restaurant, after which Alex and I came home and played Magic with Kevin until 3 a.m. Which is why I'm getting a bit of a late start today. But my blue-green deck triumphed, so I am well-satisfied in that regard. (Triumphed may be a bit of an overstatement, but it definitely held its own at least. :-)
Hey, how do you manage playing Magic in a casual, social situation? Do you have a few pre-made decks lying around that people pick from? Or am I misunderstanding, and all three of you are regular Magic players who spend some amount of free time designing decks?
We did a fairly standard sealed-deck thing. Took about a thousand Magic cards, sans lands. Tossed them together on the dining table and shuffled them around a lot so they were well-mixed. Each drew 125 cards and then went off to another room to see what we had and make a deck from it. Took as much land as we wanted to add, once the deck was built, with a minimum of 40 cards and max of 60 cards total. Since we didn’t know what colors the others would be using, none of us used any specific anti-color cards.
This process took a little time (maybe half an hour?) but was fun. I was somewhat frustrated by getting only a dozen red cards and kazillion white ones (I hate playing white), but ended up with a goodly number of cool artifacts and a solid blue-green deck. A bunch of big creatures and lots of little scuttling ones. 🙂